Allograft
by Rokhal
Summary: What happens when two supersoldiers freeze and stick together? Improvised surgery to cut them free, and awkward emotional talks they'd rather avoid until then.
1. Chapter 1

The stolen Quinjet burst into smoke and alarms, spiraling out of the cold gray Siberian sky. It was a precision hit. Steve routed all remaining power to the good turbofan, buckled himself in, and tumbled into a crude and furious emergency landing. Before the slightly squashed cockpit even stopped swaying, he was up, jerking open the doors that held the survival kits. He grabbed two, left the guns.

Stark hovered in the air in the distance, wobbling closer on one foot repulsor. Briefly, Steve regretted stopping his blows when he had.

"CAP," Stark's speakers blared. "COME BACK TO THE BUNKER, GET IN THE CHOPPER, AND LET'S SORT THIS OUT LIKE ADULTS."

Steve gave a hollow bark of laughter. He turned his back deliberately and raised his middle finger, holding his fist high overhead, and jogged away until he heard the whine of the Iron Man suit retreating behind him.

He'd held Stark back long enough for Bucky to escape out the top of the silo, hammered the Iron Man suit until Stark could barely walk, never mind hunt—or so he'd thought. He'd tossed the shield away, thrown it in Stark's face. At ground level, he'd found the Quinjet, undisturbed, and a snowmobile, saddlepacks open and ransacked, and no other vehicles. Bucky was gone, apparently on foot. Steve took off in the Quinjet to work a spiral search pattern, and had covered a radius of thirty miles from the Hydra bunker when Stark reappeared and shot him down.

Stark was gone now. Steve ran to keep his blood flowing in the biting wind. Wherever Bucky was, he wasn't leaving tracks, which meant he was picking his way among the rocks and ridgelines. By his previous searching, Steve knew there were only so many routes Bucky could have taken to disappear.

He ran through the night. He had a flashlight, but did not risk turning it on. Shamefully, he knew Bucky did not want to be found.

* * *

At dawn, he ate snow and energy shots. He was beginning to starve, a slow slide he had entered many times during the war, where his calves would wither inside his boots over the course of a day. It would reverse if he got food. He did not know where food might be coming from in this wasteland, but he assumed Bucky knew a way.

He grid-searched the rocks and mountains, smelling the air. Bucky smelled like fear-sweat now, and since their brief stay in a hotel on the way out of Austria, like cheap lemon-verbena body wash. This, too, he knew from the war—the way scents hung on the air, flowing with the faint air currents: deceptive, but invaluable if you knew where the air had come from.

He ran through another night. He contemplated turning on his own emergency beacon, but who would answer? No one who would not stop him.

* * *

The next morning, he cut through a great snowfield to reach a different, parallel ridge of exposed rock, and ran its length up and down. He could feel his body consuming itself, reshaping itself. He tightened his belt and his shoelaces, and sprang lightly, ceaselessly over the rock. His nostrils and eyelashes crusted with ice. Sometimes he could barely breathe past it, and had to rip it free while he gasped painfully on the sharp air.

The next night was clear. The stars burned down bright enough to light his way, and he understood that the last few days had been warm for this place. The last heat he hadn't even known the land had, radiated away into black space.

* * *

Dawn was brilliant. The glare of the sun on the snow blinded him in every direction. He had no food.

It was madness that drove him, he realized. He was already dead, and didn't know it. Bucky was already dead, somewhere, and when Steve found him, then he could lie down and stop, then his madness would have an answer, a conclusion. He ran.

* * *

He found Bucky wedged between two boulders sheared apart by ice, a dark, private spot protected from sun and meltwater. Steve put a red, chapped hand to his face, and it was cold and stiff. There were no wounds. He was still dressed in the heavy coat he'd worn to fight, with the sleeve torn off. No glove on his right hand. His boots were laced. A map, doubtless taken from the snowmobile, was scrawled all over, not with a route, but with writing in Cyrillic. Bucky had pinned the map to the front of his jacket. A backpack, which still held a few energy bars and five hundred Euros, was wedged under his boots.

Bucky was cold and stiff and had no heartbeat and was not breathing. Steve slid one of Bucky's knives from his thigh holster and held it under his nose. It did not fog.

This meant nothing.

Steve ate an energy bar, and gently lifted Bucky from his crevice. He shook out the two mylar blankets in the survival kit, used one to hide Bucky's eyes from the sun, put the other around the back of them. He stripped out of his uniform, cut Bucky's pants off at the sides, sliced open the back of Bucky's coat, down to the skin, and peeled him like a lobster. He pressed himself close around his ice-cold corpse, and wrapped them both in the mylar.

He had fire-starters, but there was nothing to burn. It would have to be body heat. That was probably safer, anyway. In an hour, Steve would wake up and eat another of Bucky's energy bars, keep living, bring him back by the warmth of his skin. In the mean time, Steve would sleep.

Steve slept.

* * *

He burned.

He burned in his skin and his joints and his bones and his lungs, cold fire, endless, that pulsed through him in relentless waves, and in the dim thought left to him in the dark, he wished Bucky was far from where he was, because he was a suicide in Hell.

* * *

He woke and he was alive. The air was stifling hot, dry, his tongue was stiff in his mouth, every limb ached, and there was a body in his arms, blessedly cool and—he breathed—stinking of fear and lemon-verbena and mildew. The breath hurt, like his lungs were full of knives, and the sensation disturbed him. He decided not to breathe again for a while.

Gradually he realized there was the sound of water dripping. Once the body in his arms shifted, breathed, tensed. Held the breath for eternity. He would do the same, the next time he needed to breathe.

His heart beat, now and then. Every time it did, a rush of pain hammered through his skull, and he wished it would stop. But it persisted, the intervals shorter and shorter, as the dripping water flowed steadily, and he found himself breathing more and more often, the pain in his lungs rising, the scent of blood on his breath. He opened his eyes to darkness, and saw a devil.

No. A red face, with yellow eyes. The Vision, hovering, staring down at him. Them. In Steve's arms, breathing under his chin: Bucky, alive.

Vision's eyes flickered, alert, in the soft light that crept through a steel doorjam. Beside him sat a massive chunk of sea ice, sitting on a rusted steel chair, melting softly onto concrete. Steve tried to shape a word and the hinge of his jaw flared with pain. In his arms, Bucky grunted in warning.

"Be patient," Vision said, rising. "You are reviving. You are safe. I have told no one where you are."

There was very little light in the small dark room, but even that hurt to look at. It took Steve a very long time to close his eyes.

* * *

When Steve next woke, he felt much more conventionally alive, but now he was fucking freezing. His whole body was wracked with shivers, so was Bucky's, and they were wrapped neatly in something clammy and slick. He recognized the feel of a mylar space blanket. Every part of his body still hurt, like when he'd used to drink himself sick with Bucky before the serum, and, oddly, his heart was racing like he'd just fallen off a building. He squinted at their surroundings: a small dark concrete cell with empty shelves lining the walls, paint peeling off every surface in thick sheets. No one had been here in decades.

His head throbbed, and every limb was pins and needles, and his front itched where it was pressed against Bucky's skin, but he felt collected enough to explore. He shifted his hand to pry himself upright.

"Don't move," Bucky stopped him.

His voice was almost unrecognizable, so soft as though afraid to be heard, in that faceless twenty-first century accent Steve found himself using now also.

A soft footfall beside their heads, and Vision knelt down. "Good afternoon. I had thought you would become conscious earlier. Do you recognize me?"

"You're Vision," Steve rasped.

"One of Stark's robots," Bucky said, and Steve twitched.

"I prefer the term 'android,' and Mister Stark does not own me," Vision corrected him, his gleaming face betraying no emotion.

Bucky sighed. "Of course. I don't like that word, either."

Vision smiled. "Do you remember the date when you left Mister Stark?"

'Left.' Steve couldn't answer that, and neither could Bucky. They'd had bigger concerns.

Vision made the tip of his finger glow and shined it in their eyes, asked them vintage and modern historical questions, had them count backwards from twenty, and name the members of the European Union and the states of the United States in alphabetical order. Steve forgot about Alaska. Bucky couldn't decide between ordering names by the latin or the cyrillic alphabets.

"I can tentatively say that you have sustained no additional neurologic injury from your torpor," Vision pronounced. "Captain, don't try to stand."

"I didn't earn that rank," Steve retorted. He levered himself up from the ground, and his chest hurt and Bucky grunted. He flopped back down and Bucky cursed. "Buck?"

"Not now, Steve," he gritted.

"Are you hurt?" Steve pushed, feeling over Bucky's chest. Bucky slapped him away after the most cursory exploration. There were no wounds. Steve's right arm by the shoulder itched where it was bound up somehow, and his leg itched, and the whole of his chest down to his drawers. Bucky's left arm was ice cold—Steve thought of the block of ice that had been in here the first time he'd woken. He felt around where he could, pried them into a sitting position—the exact position they'd been in when he'd wrapped himself around Bucky's still body out on the ridge. With his left arm he felt Bucky's chest for injury, a bandage, and found nothing. He dug into the itching area where their skin was pressed together, and felt a seam.

There was no other word for it. He slid his hand between their chests, and it went so far until it stopped. The skin itched and itched and grew swollen and corded as his hand probed deeper, then it turned right around and flowed into Bucky. "Mother of Christ," he swore.

They were attached at at least five points: right shoulder, left thigh, and large irregular unions between Steve's chest and belly and Bucky's back.

"Don't get work yourself up, you're not the worst thing I ever woke up attached to me," Bucky muttered, sounding more like himself.

"What?" Steve sputtered. This was the serum, it had to be—unless someone had done this to them? Where had Vision found them?

"You tell me," Bucky said, deliberately level. Steve could feel every muscle tense, and both their hearts were still racing. "I know how I bedded down."

Steve worked to swallow. His mouth was so dry. "You were cold," he said lamely.

Vision waited them out a minute, but no more answers came. "You have been missing for eight months," he announced. "I am confident your friends will be pleased to see you alive, though I imagine they might feel guilt over the circumstances. I, currently, feel guilt. We had been operating on the assumption that the two of you had gone underground. Figuratively. But as neither I nor Ms. Romanov had found a trace of you, despite recent events, I went discreetly to the last place you were seen, to recover your bodies. When I found you, your bodies appeared to be undamaged and your position appeared deliberate. I followed the instructions on the Winter Soldier's note and you revived naturally over the course of the last hundred and twenty-two hours. The fact that you have survived is extraordinary, though perhaps expected given historical facts."

"What recent events?" Steve demanded.

Bucky shrugged violently, tugging at Steve's shoulder and midsection. "Later. I need to eat before we cut ourselves apart."

* * *

Vision managed to locate for them a twenty-pound box of potato flakes, half of which was not visibly moldy, and a can of beef hash that had been wedged into the ceiling elsewhere in the complex. He did not find a pot to cook in, but did find a glass bottle and two enamel-and-tin mugs, and their gear had canteens. He built a fire and melted snow for them in a pan made from part of a steel door, and Bucky ate potato flakes by the handful, washing them down with meltwater. Steve had no appetite. He sat awkwardly, trying to yield and move and generally get out of Bucky's way, as Bucky swallowed the tasteless and bone-dry powder.

"According to your physiologic data, this ration contains enough calories to sustain the two of you for twenty hours of consciousness at this temperature," Vision remarked, "but that is not accounting for any toxins the mold may be producing. I will procure food and blankets. You should tend the fire until I return."

"Eat the stew," Steve told Bucky.

"I'm saving it."

The Vision drifted out the door and shut it carefully, leaving them alone with themselves and their smoky fire and a small pile of dead pine twigs. Steve fussed with the mylar blanket. Bucky choked back a stomach heave and sipped water.

Bucky's hair tickled Steve's nose, and Steve turned his head so as not to breathe directly into his ear. Bucky's stomach churned, violently at first, then steadily, and Steve's headache began to fade. His heart settled down, though he still shivered and his skin was covered in goosepimples.

"Where were you running to?" Steve asked at last, into the oppressive silence.

Bucky hunched forward, dragging Steve with him, then straightened again. He pointed at the stack of clothing Vision had left them in a corner of the shed. "My knife's over there. I think we can crawl on our side."

"Right or left?"

"Left."

Their left side had two arms free, but their thighs were welded together. Steve supposed that made sense as it would be easier to right themselves with two arms than one if they fell over. They leaned to the left on the count of three and wormed toward Bucky's kit, grunting and wincing when they moved out of sync and the seams tugged. Steve's thigh was fixed high on Bucky's so that if they tried to stand, Steve would have to raise his left leg, and the welded area was wide, at least eight inches. It didn't seem to stretch or twist well.

Bucky pawed through what remained of his belongings and retrieved the knife Steve had used to cut him out of his clothes. After two painful attempts, they sat back up. He passed Steve the knife sheath. "Bite this."

It was nylon, with a rigid plastic insert. Tasted like honing oil. Steve flexed his jaw experimentally and nudged Bucky's shoulder with his chin, and then Bucky twisted them to the right, and motioned for Steve to lift his right arm as far away as he could. The seam ached and stung, and Bucky took a few sharp breaths then sliced neatly into it.

The pain was manageable, but closer to what Steve expected for cutting out a bullet than for peeling off a burn. There was also a tremendous hot gush of blood. Bucky was only half through the join; Steve kept stretching his arm away and Bucky coolly flipped the knife around and finished the cut in the other direction. Steve pulled his arm back and sharp jets of blood sprayed everywhere. Bucky dropped the knife and clamped his left hand over his shoulder, blood all over the plates and seeping between the joins. Steve awkwardly gripped his own wound by crossing his arms behind his head.

There was a substantial puddle of blood on the floor. Steve could feel arteries trying to jet under his fingers.

"I don't think we should do the rest unless we can get transfusions," Bucky said. He craned his neck over, let up with his left hand, and let the wound spray all over the wall, all over his face, all over Steve's face. One by one, he pinched the spurting vessels with his finger and thumb and spun his wrist around in an unnatural motion, twisting them until they broke deep within his flesh. When he was finished, the wound was still all oozing muscle, but the blood stopped hitting the wall, except for a couple very small vessels close around the skin edges that he could not get a grip on. Steve squeezed his own wound steadily. Bucky's face was a red mask. Steve sighed heavily and spat the knife sheath out.

"Why don't you wrap it with something," Steve suggested. They were both shuddering again. Bucky reached for what was left of his undershirt and tied it around his body, over the shoulder wound and around under his left arm. He passed Steve a wide strip from his trousers. Steve got himself bandaged, and they slumped, exhausted, in their pool of blood.

"I wasn't really running _to_ anything," Bucky said softly. Steve had to backtrack to make sense of what he was talking about. "I do remember you, some. I remember how I couldn't quite say no to you. Some of what it was, you and me. Me, Bucky Barnes, I got this . . . scene, in my head, early on, like a vision. I was walking a woman home after dark, can't remember her goddamn name, but she was somebody important, she had _connections_. It must've made sense at the time. I got my hand in hers, this gorgeous dame, escorting her home, and I remember I was so anxious she was gonna want to ask me in for a nightcap because if she got my tie off she might see how I cut out the back of my tie and replaced it with muslin so I could use the silk to make a matching pocket square. I was worried she might tell all her friends, and I'd never get _in_. Wherever _in_ was. They say people change, but that Bucky Barnes might as well be a fucking Martian.

"So I figure, if that's what being a person is, I ain't it. First I was afraid if I turned myself in to you I'd get decommissioned, or, or psychologically evaluated, or whatever they'd call it. But you sounded sincere on TV, and I started to remember how you could never lie without making this face like you were chewing glass. But you were out every week with your team engaging hostiles, and I can't do that for you. Just after I got out, I took out my maintenance team. I wanted to kill 'em. I like killing. I can't help it, they trained me like a dog and I got the taste for it. Hell, Sergeant Barnes probably had the taste for it, too, or he wouldna been such a decorated sharpshooter.

"If I went to you, you'd ask me along on your missions, and I wouldn't say no, and sooner or later I'd be killing people on your watch, because HYDRA gave me the taste for it. You're a better man than that, you don't need my kind of help.

"So I went to Europe to get away from the news cycle and took odd jobs until you tracked me down."

Steve digested this. "I'm not that good," he said. "I'm starting to like killing HYDRA agents."

"That means you should stop," said Bucky hollowly.

"But where were you trying to go when you left the bunker?"

Bucky shrugged. "Here. But I misread the landmarks. Best option was to lie low for a bit."

"Lie low," Steve parroted.

"I'm starving, let's go back to that fucking stew," Bucky said.

With his left hand, Bucky pinched the rim of the can of hash and wiggled it until it tore, then he squeezed in at the walls until the top folded up slightly. He ripped the top off the can and licked spilled stew off his bloody wrist, then ate quickly and neatly, using the torn lid as a crude spoon. Steve watched over his shoulder.

"You want any?"

"Not hungry."

Bucky shrugged and finished the hash, then swirled some water from his canteen in the bottom of the can, drank the residue. It smelled gamy and overcooked, like dog food.

"Remember Maureen Forth's baby?" Steve asked. Bucky shrugged, and he continued. "She had this little stump of a finger on the side of her hand when she was born. The doctors put a cord around the base of it, real tight, and it withered away after a few weeks and it fell off. The Forths used to live in your mom's building, off the same hallway."

"Cried all day and night for months," Bucky said, as though to himself. "Guess that's why. You want to try that? Pinch me off like a mole?"

"Be less bloody."

"I had fifty feet of paracord in my pants. On three. One. Two."

They flopped over again, still on their left side so as not to disturb the bandages. Bucky got out his parachute cord, and Steve, having the best view, snaked a length around the join of their left thighs and a longer section clear around all the joins that fused Steve's front to Bucky's back. Steve tightened them until the seams burned with stretching, and they wrapped themselves back in the mylar blankets and waited for Vision to return.

"Where are we, anyway?" Steve asked.

"Old logging camp. Prison."

* * *

They huddled and shivered silently, not sleeping. Steve periodically tightened the cords whenever the pain started to ease. After a few hours, the Vision barged back in, uncharacteristically noisy, burdened by a heavy wool blanket bulging with small objects. He set it on the floor and at least a hundred pounds of cans spilled out. Bucky jerked upright and said something delighted and incomprehensible. Vision replied in the same language, probably Russian, with a shy smile. He handed Bucky a can and Bucky got to work again wiggling it open.

"Did you bring a can opener?" Steve asked.

Vision frowned. "Oh."

Bucky tucked in and said something else.

"What's he saying?" Steve asked. Bucky's mouth was full.

"First he called me Father Frost, as a joke," Vision said. "Then he said the tinned beef is fucking good shit because it doesn't taste like it was stewed in rat urine."

That sounded like Bucky, when he was sixteen. Ate like him, too.

While Bucky stuffed himself, Steve and Vision tucked them into the scratchy wool blankets Vision had brought, and Vision stuffed their feet into socks and insulated boots. Steve thought he might start feeling warm after another day or so. He looked at Vision.

"Is anyone else coming?"

Vision looked especially placid. Steve knew it was the android's way of looking shifty. "No. I will contact no one without your approval. Though I have hijacked a communications satellite, if you wish me to use it."

"I thought you worked for Stark's son," Bucky said.

Vision looked very, very placid. You could skip stones across his serenity. "I do. I always have, and I suspect I always will. But my loyalty to Mister Stark has cost me the trust of a dear friend and my only surviving peer. It was a hard lesson. I am no longer Just A Rather Very Intelligent System, and I need not, must not, obey blindly."

"Where are Steve's friends now?" Bucky asked.

"You and I are here," Vision replied. "The Falcon is active, based out of New York on probation. The Black Widow is officially in Tanzania. Hawkeye is at large after evading house arrest. Spiderman has been very concerned that no one has heard from you, and I suspect he would be pleased to be considered your friend; he is in New York City. Ant Man is on probation. Mister Stark considers himself Steve's friend on some days; Colonel Rhodes has stated in private that he would assist you, Bucky, in evading capture if necessary; however his stance toward Steve is unfavorable. Miss Potts is in Madripoor—"

"Where's Wanda?" Steve interrupted.

"The Raft," Vision said, without changing expression one flicker. "It is a submersible prison intended to contain—"

"Shit," Steve said softly.

"—unconventional threats. Stark Industries' lawyers have been able to secure minor concessions for her comfort. But the Oversight Committee is unwilling to consider release. I do have questions of my own."

Bucky set aside his can and straightened in his seat, dragging Steve with him.

"How did you learn the seawater revival technique? All technical records of the Winter Soldier program refer to various antifreeze solutions injected prior to cryostasis, and a very precise incubation temperature for revival."

Bucky relaxed slightly. "That was an accident. I ran off in the seventies. I was on an op with my team. By the time they found me, I was like that. They panicked, who wouldn't, I was valuable, and it'd be their heads. One of the men went to college in Moscow for a few years, and he had the idea of using salted ice to bring my temperature up evenly before starting the real thaw. It worked. I should've figured they left that part out when they made their report. I still got disciplined, though. Say, any of those antifreeze solutions work in human trials?"

"No," Vision said. "Nor in fruit-fly trials. Perhaps they had value as a placebo."

Bucky grinned, his stubble scraping Steve's ear. "You're all right, Mr. Android."

"Who else is working on getting Wanda out?" Steve interrupted.

"Her lawyers assure me that any extralegal action would be catastrophic for her future. I saw that you did not activate your emergency beacon, this is why I have kept silent about your survival."

"You dumb fuck!" Bucky shouted. "You had a fucking beacon!?"

Vision had mastered the art of "changing the subject."

"I was gonna get you out," Steve said. "I wasn't planning to sleep for eight months."

"It was forty below, the fuck you think was gonna happen? You gave me freezerburn and frostbit yourself, weeping Christ, you are the dumbest fuck who ever run headfirst into a post, the shit you get me into, Steve. The shit you do. Maybe I was gonna sleep till the second coming, huh? What's the fucking problem? But no, you gotta follow me inta hell and then you say, Buck! Pal! Fresher hell over yonder, even more hellish, what a fucking delight! Let's go!"

Steve swallowed hard, his throat rubbing Bucky's shoulder.

"Did I go too far," Bucky asked softly.

"I can't argue," Steve said.

Bucky sighed, and passed him what was left of his hash. "Eat. Tushonka's real good, better than Spam."

Steve wrapped his arms awkwardly over Bucky's shoulders so he could maneuver the improvised spoon. The food sat like lead in his gut.


	2. Chapter 2

"I'll need a latrine call tomorrow," Bucky said as they huddled in the blankets.

Steve tightened the cord between their thighs.

* * *

They passed a long cold night mostly sleepless, like bunking in a hotel with the guy you just finished a political shouting match with. Bucky jerked violently whenever he started to drift off, and they were both constantly bothered by the itch and stretch of the parachute cord strangling the joins. The thigh join began to narrow rapidly, so that Steve could coil the ends of the cord repeatedly around it. The chest join was harder to track. By morning, the join was a stalk two inches wide, long enough that Steve could fit two fingers between their legs. It was maddeningly too short to cut, pulsing with blood.

"I could pinch it off," Bucky said, reaching in with his left hand.

"You'll just cut it, it's almost long enough to tie around," Steve protested.

Bucky wrapped his fingers around the join and fanned them slightly. It felt like he was trying to tear part of Steve's leg off. Steve's heart began to race again, and they both breathed hard. Bucky's left hand was tireless and unyielding, tightening and stretching for two hours, slipping in a third finger, then the forth, until his hand was a tight fist between them. He let off and Steve gasped with relief. Steve looked down at the area. Chafed and wrinkled skin on each of their thighs led to an angry, thin-skinned sheath of squirming blood vessels. Steve untied the loosened parachute cord and knotted it tightly around the vessels at each end, a new pain that settled into hot tingling. Bucky got his knife and slid it through the center, and the ends of the join flopped loosely after spitting out a little gob of trapped blood. Steve groaned and stretched his leg out to the side.

"Crouch up. Grab onto my shoulders, keep hold of the blanket. Stand on three," Bucky said. They tucked their legs up, Steve gave Bucky a push to get to standing, and then they found that they could just about ambulate if Bucky crouched low, Steve walked on tip-toe in his boots, and Steve pushed down hard with his hands to take weight off the remaining joins. The blanket at their back flopped loosely down from Steve's shoulders, letting all the warm air out. Bucky grabbed the back of the steel chair Vision had had the ice block on and headed for the door.

Steve had grown to think it was cold inside the shed. Outside the shed, the air squeezed him from all directions like searching talons. The snow was only inches deep, but it stacked irregularly into drifts, piled by the wind like desert sand, neither crusting nor clumping in the unrelenting cold. He flicked the blanket across Bucky's chest as best he could.

Vision had set them up in a small thick-walled outbuilding with a high steep steel roof. Around them were longer, larger buildings, all heavily built, with few small windows, small chimneys that looked inadequate for the space they were meant to heat. A high, sagging chainlink fence crowned with barbed wire ringed the bare space, downed in places by fallen pine trees.

Bucky shuffled around to the side of their outbuilding, set the chair aside, braced his hands against the wall, and pissed for a long time. He shook off and dropped drawers. "Sit on the edge of the chair. Hands under my thighs."

They thumped heavily into the seat, almost knocking it over and yanking hard on the torso joins. Steve lost his grip on the blanket and the air assaulted them from all sides. He got himself perched on the front of the seat, got the blanket tucked out of the way, spread his legs wide and made Bucky a seat between them with his hands. Bucky promptly leaned forward as best he could and let out a soft grunt. Steve made himself inanimate, looked out into the trees. His breath froze on the air and drifted down with an ephemeral tinkling sound. The steam below was doing the same. Even the smell froze.

"Set me down, get the blanket," Bucky said, and braced himself against Steve's thighs so Steve could have his hands back. "Stand on three. One, two." They stood, shuffled to stand beside the chair. Bucky tugged his drawers back up. "You need a turn?"

"No," Steve said. Bucky grabbed the chair again and they made their shambling way back into the shed.

"We should stand for a bit, stretch it out so maybe we can walk," Bucky said once they shut the door inside. They made their way to their little fire and basked in it, blanket behind them. Bucky scratched blood off his face and checked under the bandage on his shoulder—smooth pink skin now, not even shiny like scar tissue. He frowned.

"What?" Steve asked.

"I don't heal like that," Bucky said.

Steve couldn't undo the bandage on his own shoulder without dropping the blanket, but it felt healed overnight, as he had come to expect since the serum. "It'll get us out of this faster." He eased back from his toes a bit more, feeling a sick stretch in his solar plexus, and pinned one edge of the blanket against his shoulder with his chin so he could free one hand to inspect the remaining loop of parachute cord. As he'd tightened it in the night, it had sunk deeper and deeper into the seam. It felt moist now, around the knot. Steve dug his fingers deeper, feeling for the cord.

He felt his own fingernails scraping against skin, but his fingernails were facing Bucky's back.

He hit the seam. He couldn't feel the cord.

"I think we ate it," he said.

"What?"

"The paracord. We healed back over it."

"Are you fuckin kidding me."

The join felt wider than when they had first woken up, and more solid. Like one big union, not a half-dozen welded patches.

"I got a multitool somewhere," Bucky said, and they shuffled back to their pile of clothing and Bucky dug a knife with attached scissors out of one of their bags. Steve dropped the blanket, leaned back as far as he could, and located the knot by touch. He wedged the scissors into the gap and got them to gnaw the cord apart after a few minutes. He pulled gently on the knotted end and felt it catch painfully somewhere low in his belly. Bucky hissed. Watery blood oozed up between their chests.

"We can cut it out," Steve said. "Or I could keep pulling. Or I could leave it and start over."

"I say start over," Bucky muttered. "Get some of that mylar."

"Fold it around the cord?"

"Yeah. Like how they stick parchment between chunks of fudge."

Steve wrapped a new length of parachute cord around the seam, with two wide strips of mylar folded around it as a gasket. The stretching and pinching started up again, worse now that a continuous seep of dilute blood oozed up around the knot of the old cord. Steve gave it a slow gentle pull every now and then, and every time it dragged and sawed. Bucky ate two more cans of tushonka, forced Steve to eat one.

There was a knock at the door, and Bucky hissed, lunged them painfully across the room for a knife. Only instinct had Steve keeping up with him. "It's Vision! It's just Vision! Come in!"

Vision, unburdened by cans or blankets, phased through the wall. "I scouted a one-hundred kilometer radius. No one appears to suspect your presence. There is a town with an airstrip ninety kilometers to the south, and a fuel depot fifty kilometers to the southeast. Thus." He faced the most featureless wall and called up the white glow of the stone in his forehead, projecting an aerial map, labeled in English with town names in Cyrillic.

Steve and Bucky were both trembling. Bucky took deep slow breaths as he studied the wall.

"Bucky's going to need cold weather gear after we get detached," Steve said. "I wouldn't mind something less conspicuous to wear, either. Buck, what else will you need?"

"What?"

"When you go. I won't ask where, but . . . "

"Twelve mountain ration packs. My bag. Half the cash. Puptent, more emergency blankets, down sleeping bag. Bandages, probably."

"Vision, can you supply us?"

"It would require theft from an army base."

"Do you have a problem with that?"

Vision was silent for a beat. "Should I?"

Bucky cut in. "They'll just assume somebody sold the gear underground. It's alright."

"Someone else would be punished for the theft."

"Or you could ask Stark," Bucky suggested.

"I will steal it, then. Have you studied the map sufficiently?"

"For now. Could you mark up the paper one I took off Zemo?"

"Of course." Vision let the projection on the wall fade and turned to face them, a glow lingering from the stone in his forehead. He frowned, and kept up the glow. "Stay still." He bent and picked up one of the white-wrappered cans of tushonka, held it up beside their faces. "Look to the side, please. Just move your eyes." He frowned some more. "You have jaundice. You have an excess of bilirubin in your blood."

"What's that mean?"

"Bilirubin levels can increase in neonatal maladjustment, in liver failure due to infection or poisoning, in genetic defects of hemoglobin production or bilirubin processing, in congestive heart failure, during the rejection of a liver transplant, in hemolysis intravascular and extravascular, at altitude, following extreme muscular exhaustion, during metabolic derangements of pregnancy—"

"Can you ask a doctor?" Steve interrupted. "Discreetly?"

"We have to speed things up," Bucky said. "It took about fifteen hours to get our thighs separated, and that was, what, eight inches by six? How big are the ones we have left?"

"I think it's one big spot, now," Steve said. "About two feet around."

"That'll take two or three times as long. The blood vessels are probably bigger, too."

"I may be able to contact a doctor," Vision said hesitantly. "Doctor Helen Cho. We have remained friends since my creation. She is no longer under contract with Stark Industries or the Avengers, and would likely have sympathy for Sergeant Barnes' situation."

"It's just Bucky," Bucky said.

"Doctor Cho worked on me a lot," Steve said. "She's familiar with the serum. Definitely never HYDRA. She's been mind-controlled before."

"Is she under surveillance?" Bucky asked Vision.

"Yes," Vision said, with a tiny smirk. "By my cousin FRIDAY. I have an override already prepared."

"Override it," Steve said, "and call her."

Whatever Steve expected when Vision called Dr. Cho, it was not for Vision to maintain eye contact, not even staring into the middle distance, and to suddenly hear dialing, and then the words, "You have reached Dr. Helen Cho. Leave your name, number, and a brief message after the beep," emanating from somewhere in his body.

"Dr. Cho, this is The Vision," Vision said, and gave a phone number. "I have a complex and evolving problem involving individuals bearing the super-soldier serum. We would be grateful if you called back as soon as possible."

"Where is she working now?" Steve asked.

"She has remained at Seul National University Hospital, and has accepted command of an experimental clinic implementing nanoregenerative medicine," Vision said proudly.

"She's probably eating dinner."

"Perhaps. She tells me she enjoys the lighter travel schedule. It lets her spend more time in her lab and with her son."

They waited for Dr. Cho to finish her dinner and check her messages. Bucky and Steve sat in front of the fire again, and Bucky cracked open yet another can of hash.

"How's Sam?" Steve asked Vision. He fiddled with the tied-off stalk of skin on his thigh, which looked purple and soft, dead. He wasn't sure if it would be safe yet to trim it off.

"Sam is well," Vision said. "He is somewhat overworked because our team has lost so many members. Mister Stark has rescinded his support of the Sokovia Accords and is supporting The Falcon legally and logistically. Mister Stark and I have nominated Sam to bear the shield of Captain America after your disappearance, but the World Security Council vetoed him. As well as Mister Stark's alternate suggestion of Colonel Rhodes."

"I thought people didn't do that anymore," Steve sighed. "Sam would be a great Captain America. He . . . he believes in goodness, and hope, and mercy and helping people and building a better future than the past. And he's not gullible, like me. I'd be honored if he took the name. Hell, it's not like anyone could stop him; Stark Industries owns my copyright."

"The World Security Council and the Department of Defense expressed the desire for someone more biddable to fill your role," Vision explained.

Bucky snorted. "They shoulda approached me five years ago."

Steve almost vomited beef hash down Bucky's shoulder. Vision didn't notice.

"A Staff Sergeant William Nasland has assumed the name at the President's appointment," Vision said. "He is an Army Ranger who has earned many accolades for his work in SOCOM operations. He is currently hospitalized for a concussion and a broken pelvis. As he is unlikely to return to his duties within the year, a Major William Burnside is being considered as a replacement."

"But Stark Industries owns my copyright!" Steve protested.

"Steve, give it a rest, if the President, the Prime Minister, and the General Secretary of the Central Committee want to put your little 'A' helmet on a gorilla, bammo, Captain America is a gorilla. And if he don't step in time, bammo, new gorilla. It's for the best. If you were actually irreplaceable—" Bucky stoppered himself with last of the beef hash and a gulp of water.

"Vision, where does everyone else think you are?" Steve asked.

Vision's face was neutral. "Hovering over the North Atlantic. I . . . I have been undependable, these past months."

* * *

Dr. Cho called back an hour later. They were staring into the fire, pretending to be engrossed in the small flames, when Vision held up one hand, announced, "I am receiving a call," and they heard Helen Cho's voice emanating from his body.

"Vision? I'm in the bathroom, I've got five minutes to talk. Is it safe?"

"There is no malware on your phone," Vision said.

"You found Rogers and Barnes?"

"How did you guess?"

"Process of elimination. How are they? What's their problem?"

Steve winced. Bucky's shoulders and back tensed, pulling at something under Steve's sternum.

"I revived them from a condition of natural cryofreeze," Vision said. "They were frozen in a position of close contact. As an unexpected consequence of Steve Rogers' enhanced healing, parts of their bodies have merged together and must be separated. Also, they are hyperbilirubinemic."

"Conjugated or unconjugated?" Dr. Cho asked.

"I do not know. I apologize."

"Did you say merge? Did I hear that right?"

"You did, Doctor Cho."

"Can you get me a picture?"

Steve untied the parachute cord and pulled the mylar out of the seam, hissing in relief. He and Bucky, finally warm, had been sweating against the plastic. Belatedly, he undid the bandage on his upper arm and tried to scrub some blood from his face. He set the blanket down and pulled one side, then the other, as far away from Bucky as he could so Vision could blink at the ropy scar-like fold of skin that joined them. "Don't mind the blood, Doc," Steve said.

Dr. Cho was silent for a moment, and Vision waited placidly for her to evaluate the images he had apparently sent. "I always worried about something like this with Steve," she said at last. "With Barnes, there was never any mention of this kind of exuberant regenerative activity, but with Steve, this is exactly why I always had the medics bandage and splint everything in strict anatomical alignment, as soon as they could, even ribs. Gibbons had to cut his fingers apart once where he'd bandaged them together."

Steve listened in silent shame.

"Barnes, do you know your blood type?" Dr. Cho's voice asked.

Bucky cringed. "No."

"It's O positive," Steve supplied.

"And Steve's AB negative, because he has to be special," Dr. Cho said. "That's our answer on the icterus, Barnes' serum is attacking Rogers' RBCs. Have the two of you been experiencing strokes? Cramping, muscle weakness, dark urine, changes in consciousness, coughing blood?"

They shook their heads, alarmed.

"The serum must be covering for that," she said. "Steve's serum. Vision, your tissue should be able to emit and receive ultrasonic vibrations. Do you think you could convert reflected vibration data into a 2-D cross-sectional image?"

"As JARVIS, I designed several ultrasound processing chips," Vision said. He peered at his fingers. "I can do what you describe. Steve, Bucky, may I touch you?"

"Go ahead," Steve said, and Bucky nodded. Vision eased his flat hand between their chests until his fingertips contacted the join. Steve heard a faint, barely perceptible whine and felt warmth in the area.

"Increase brightness," Dr. Cho said. "Depth enhance. Depth enhance. Less zoom. Okay, pan superior to inferior, slowly." Vision slid his hand from the top of the join to the bottom, just above Steve's groin. "Which side is this? Thanks, labels. Other side now." Jarvis stepped around them and did the opposite side.

When he finished, Dr. Cho announced, "I have to get back to dinner. You've given me a lot to think about. I think your priority should be to get Rogers and Barnes to a surgical suite."

"They are both fugitives from the law," Vision said. Steve and Bucky shook their heads frantically at them, and Bucky made some kind of arcane Soviet military hand signals. "Also, they are both at least forty-eight hours from the nearest reliable ground transportation." Vision made a query with his hands, and Bucky answered with a thumbs-up. "Doctor Cho, does Seoul National University have a headset and handset for telesurgery?"

There was a pregnant pause. "The hospital's handsets are heavily monitored. In my office, I have a refurbished handset and an Oculus Rift. It's for Am's birthday." Another pause. "This is fucked, Vision. I'm looking at their outstanding warrants, and this is very fucked. Barnes is termed 'misplaced ordinance.' 'Confiscate on sight.' They need surgical care and pain control—There's a vial of M-134 in Krakow for Rogers. But Barnes, if they're sharing blood, the Soviet opiate derivatives used on him weren't that potent, he could respiratory arrest."

"They never sedated me for surgery without paralyzing me too," Bucky supplied.

"Out of the question without a ventilator," Cho said.

"They made me go without before," Bucky said. "Without drugs, I mean. If you can figure out something for Steve—"

"We're getting side-tracked," Steve said. "Can we survive getting separated soon enough that we don't die of strokes—"

"Kidney failure—" Cho corrected.

"—Without getting Bucky captured by Secretary Ross or Prime Minister Putin immediately after?"

Cho was silent for a while. "There is no record of either of you suffering a wound infection. Even when you really should have. Survive, yes. To be frank, Steve, you could survive open heart surgery done with a kitchen knife and some used dental floss, as long as you lost less than a gallon of blood. Barnes practically has survived that. But I don't want to victimize you all over again if I have any better option. I've really got to go, but I'll call you back."

Vision's body emitted a dial tone, then the sound shut off. "You can trust Doctor Cho, Bucky," Vision said. "She is not one to omit or overstate risks."

"Do you think I'm jumping at shadows?" Bucky asked. "Sure, I'm wanted, but I got an average face."

Steve snorted.

"Steve, you got a home to go back to. A team. You show up at the right dinners, shake the right hands, they'll hand you the shield back in no time, oh, who am I kidding. You should do that. Don't risk all that on my account."

"If there's anyone who should be worried about getting cut on, it's you," Steve said. "You get scars. Whatever reason you're healing different now, it might stop once we get separated."

"Speaking of, you need to eat," Bucky deflected. "I swear you make me do all the work." He cracked open a can for Steve and passed it over the shoulder, and Steve forced it down, chastened.

"I will have to fly to the army base and back for a field surgical kit," Vision said as they waited for Dr. Cho to finish her dinner. "I will also steal clothes and boots for both of you. I can confer with Doctor Cho en route, but before I go I should map the anatomy of the area she will be working on."

He fitted his hand against the seam again, and passed it slowly over and around each side, several times, as Steve leaned back as best he could to give him room.

"What are you doing now?" Bucky asked curiously. Steve stared at the back of his head, surprised and pleased.

"I am emitting high frequency vibrations in many directions and recording the echoes they make," Vision replied. "The resistance of your tissues to the passage of sound causes distortion in the echoes, from which a crude map of your bodies can be made, based on . . . the best common word is texture. From this data, I am constructing a three-dimensional model of the area that I will hold in my memory to send to Doctor Cho's personal holoprojector for surgical planning." When he finished, he helped Steve re-tie the parachute cord and mylar around the join, nodded to them, and passed through the door.

* * *

They fell back into their new routine of silence, staring into the flames, and ignoring the waves of pain that sharpened whenever Steve tightened the constricting cord.

"I'll stay in touch if you'll let me," Bucky said after two hours had passed.

"'Course I will," Steve exclaimed. His throat caught. "What, you think I'd tell you to shove off after all we been through? If you want to live in my ceiling like a raccoon, I'll let you. If you want to sleep in my . . . well, I can't have everything, but at least send me a postcard."

"I'll send you postcards," Bucky said. "Can't say they'll be local or current, but I can swing that." He gazed into the fire, and Steve tightened the cord and mylar they had replaced around the join. "I haven't been giving you the straight dick, Steve," he admitted.

"What do you mean?"

"I've been lying off my ass since you tracked me down. I don't remember everything. That don't mean I don't remember anything. Just enough to get into trouble." He was silent, tense. Something tugged in Steve's gut and his heart began to race again. "When you're around, I don't always know what's gonna come outta my mouth and it scares the shit outta me. I need some time to get organized. But once I do, I'll come find you."

Steve's eyes prickled and he squeezed them shut. He resisted the urge to hug Bucky. "I'll keep the hounds off you 'till you do," he choked.

They sat stiffly and pretended they could not feel each-other trembling.


	3. Chapter 3

"Let's lean over, I need to vomit," Steve announced, pulling Bucky onto their right side. Bucky braced himself on his elbow as Steve began to lurch.

" _Blyad_. Steve, hold it in. It'll pass. It won't do us any good if you start puking." He started to add something unintelligible, stopped himself, and started over. "There is a hot dry wind moving down your throat. When it gets to your belly it makes you warm and dry. There is a hot dry wind moving down your throat—"

"That supposed to be comforting?" Steve choked, swallowing back ten-year-old Russian beef.

"I think so? Picture it. There is a hot dry wind moving down your throat. When it gets to your belly you are warm and dry."

"Hot dry wind," Steve muttered to himself, taking deep breaths, "warm and dry. Hot dry wind, warm and dry." He repeated a half-dozen times, then they pushed themselves back upright.

"Sorry," Steve said. "I didn't know I could still do that." He looked at the moons of his fingernails in the firelight. It was hard to tell if they were turning yellow or not.

Bucky shook his canteen. Empty. "We gotta melt more snow."

"My survival packs have electrolyte tablets," Steve said.

"Let's get up. Gather snow, piss first. On three. One, two."

There was a rap at the door.

"Come in," Steve called.

Vision trudged in, carrying two large arctic-camo duffel bags covered in frost. It was dark outside. He opened one of them and pulled out Russian army BDUs and assorted cold weather gear, folding them into neat piles. From the other, he took more cans of tushonka, a half dozen brown glass bottles labelled in dense Cyrillic, a stack of towels, a pot, and a large plastic case with a red cross on the top that looked like it would survive being thrown from a helicopter with its contents intact.

Bucky sipped electrolyte-water from his canteen and Steve restrained himself from vomiting, an effort that had kept them busy for the past four hours. Whatever tipping point they had reached, they had not managed to tip back since Steve's initial bout of nausea. They had had to make two more trips outside the shed to piss electric yellow-green into the drifting snow—usually just Bucky.

On the positive side, Steve had managed to shrink the circumference of the remaining join by six inches. It was now the size of a modest serving platter.

Vision opened the surgical kit and began laying out instruments in sealed paper packets on a clean towel. He was stalling. "What's the word?" Steve asked.

"Doctor Cho has an ultimatum," Vision replied steadily. "A colleague of hers, a surgeon, will perform the actual separation, or else she will tell Mister Stark your location."

"A colleague?"

"Doctor Rohit Kapoor. A skilled pediatric cardiovascular surgeon."

"And how do we know we can trust him?"

"Doctor Cho trusts him. She has trusted him," Vision admitted, "already. By detailing your situation to him. He has agreed to do the work. But if you do not consent to let Doctor Kapoor perform the operation, Doctor Cho is resolved to call Mister Stark."

"Well, it sounds like she hasn't left us much of a choice," Steve said. He nudged Bucky with his right shoulder. "Unless you'd rather go to Stark."

Vision glitched slightly. Every motor element froze, and something gave off a soft whine.

"What?" Bucky asked.

"There are parties that suspect Stark of hiding you and Mister Rogers. There have been requests that he surrender you in exchange for further concessions for Wanda Maximoff."

Bucky gave a long low sigh. "Thanks for telling me. Who's this Kapoor, I wanna talk to him."

"Certainly." Vision laid out packets of gauze and a bottle of iodine soap while he dialed. The line picked up after only two rings. A chill, confident voice with an indeterminate Continental accent said, "Kapoor speaking."

"Doctor Kapoor, good evening. This is the Vision, calling again. I have returned to the patients and they have asked to speak to you."

"Are they here?"

"Yes," Vision said. "You are 'on speaker.'"

"Good. Good evening, gentlemen. What questions can I answer for you?"

Bucky tensed every muscle, and Steve hovered, trying not to touch him more than necessary and wondering if he should. As Bucky struggled for words, Steve asked, "You've seen the scans. Can you do it?"

"Easily," Dr. Kapoor replied. "Though disorganized, the major connecting blood vessels are for the most part confined to four small anomalous vascular plexi. The anomalous muscular aponeuroses appear to be de novo structures arising from scar tissue under the influence of embryonic growth factors. These can simply be trimmed. The skin is the more complex problem, but this I propose to solve by mobilizing eight centimeters of skin on each side from the posterior patient and flapping it to graft over the back of the anterior patient, who I understand has a less profoundly altered healing potential. The wound of the anterior patient will be sutured; that of the posterior patient allowed to heal by second intention."

"Sounds good," Steve said, as Bucky roused himself and spat, "Fuck no."

"I'm a fast healer," Steve assured him. "I don't even scar."

"What, next time we're lost in the tundra you'll cut me a steak out of your ass like in Candide? Much as I'd love to have your nipples growing out of my back as a keepsake, you can't fix everything by sacrificing yourself." He inhaled sharply. "I think I knew this. This must be why I ran."

"Point taken, but this problem I can."

Bucky leaned forward sharply and the sharp sick tug on the join made Steve's breath catch.

"As an alternative," Dr. Kapoor cut in, "I could stage the operation, narrow the conjoined region while preserving most of the anomalous blood vessels, pack the wounds with dressing, and let The Vision or the posterior patient complete the separation by a crushing ligature after ensuring that the anterior patient is sufficiently healed."

"Okay," Steve said.

"Steve," Bucky ground out, "We have incompatible blood types. That's not better."

"I have a limited number of hours before my wife will expect me to join her in bed," Dr. Kapoor interrupted. "My first suggestion offers the quickest resolution to your conjoinment and your ongoing transfusion reactions."

"I don't want half of Steve's skin," Bucky insisted.

"Five centimeters," Dr. Kapoor countered, "and a stent bandage."

"Do it," Steve said.

Kapoor allowed Bucky about ten seconds to object, and when he remained silent, ordered, "Mister Vision, start prepping the skin."

"Wait," Bucky said, holding up a hand. "Why are you doing this? What do you get out of it?"

Dr. Kapoor paused. His steady, mildly congested breathing filled the shed, projected from Vision's body. "This is Barnes?"

"Yes."

"You strike me as a man I should be frank with. Mister Barnes, I have offered a few hours of my personal time to perform this operation because our mutual friend Doctor Helen Cho will owe me a significant favor. That is the only reason. I have no particular interest in Project Rebirth or human enhancement. Your case presents the same surgical challenge as excising a well-encapsulated, if large, benign tumor. It requires a minimum of tissue-handling skill and planning. I routinely perform far more exacting procedures on far more fragile patients. I would gain nothing from experimenting on you.

"I would also gain nothing from revealing my role in your case to HYDRA. Quite the opposite. HYDRA would offer me a pittance for my trouble, and then probably kidnap and threaten my granddaughters in an effort to extract information I could not provide and press-gang me into their ranks of hacks, quacks, and crystal-wavers. I am sixty-four years old. As a pediatric surgeon, I am regularly hounded by gossip reporters for intimate medical details about my patients that the law and the parents' wishes prohibit me from sharing. Keeping secrets is my job, and I always prefer that no one know to ask me in the first place."

Steve disliked the man more and more as he talked. Bucky said, "Okay."

"Really, Buck?"

"I know from surgeons," Bucky said. "Trust me."


	4. Chapter 4

Steve untied the cord and mylar film from around the join, grunting slightly as cold dry air hit raw skin moist with sweat, and, Steve discovered, a faint reddish coating of blood and pus. Vision took the stuff away, then gave Steve a paper mask and tied a cloth around Bucky's hair, and arranged a half dozen pen-shaped vials with needles next to each of their right hands.

"What's this?" Steve asked, since Bucky was too busy doing controlled breathing exercises.

"Doctor Cho, perhaps you could brief them now?"

Steve startled with relief. He trusted Vision's intentions, but Vision could be incongruously naive, able to detect a lie in a single microexpression but never guessing when humans were lying to themselves. Helen Cho was not merely an academic, but a government contractor and a department head. She had a decent ear for motive. And it was comforting to hear his usual internist's voice.

"We have a basic pain control plan using the drugs available. Dr. Kapoor will inject local anaesthetic where expedient as he works. Both of you respond normally to opioids, but you seem to have a faster-than-normal clearance. As far as we can gather, Steve's body clears morphine five times as fast as Bucky, but we don't know how Bucky's body will metabolize it before Steve is separated. We're having you self-administer morphine during the operation using the preloaded injector ampules. Dr. Kapoor expects the procedure to take at least two hours, so try not to inject more often than every twenty minutes. Try not to run out. We need you to stay alert enough to follow instructions. Dr. Kapoor will start as soon as Vision finishes the scrub, so you should inject yourself now."

"Yes, ma'am," Steve said. Bucky nodded silently, breathing so deep that Steve was starting to get a little light-headed. Steve picked up one of the ampules, popped the cap off with his thumb, and examined the little needle. Some kind of foolproof device for combat medicine. He jabbed it into the side of his thigh, and it burned all the way in.

Vision held his hands out until heat waves rose from them, then made them buzz until a fine dust drifted down from his fingers. He made them whirr until the heat waves stopped, and when he touched Steve's skin with a swab moist with brown surgical soap, he was barely warm. He swabbed clean Bucky and Steve's chests, down to the crease and out over their ribs and shoulders.

"Vomit," Steve said, as he felt the morphine eating the floor out from under him, and he and Bucky leaned aside so he could spit up into a towel Vision held.

"Mouthguard," Bucky demanded. Vision hunted around, and gave them each a clean sock to bite on, yielding and prickly and smelling of camphor.

Minutes of scrubbing and wiping; the fumes teased his nausea. Vision wiped off the brown soap from the left half of their chests, and swabbed it with rubbing alcohol. It chilled and stung. He unrolled a green cloth and laid out neat rows of surgical instruments on it, and knelt beside Steve and Bucky. "You may begin, Doctor Kapoor."

There was a pause and a rustling noise over the line. "I think some would say I should apologize to you," Dr. Kapoor said. Vision's hands gave a peculiar jerk, and his fingers wiggled.

"As I understand, many human cultures consider it an honor to be possessed by a wiser being," Vision said, and his head made an odd motion, pupils fixed straight ahead. Once he had gotten to know The Vision, the word 'robot' had never come to Steve's mind, his movements so fluid, his machine-grown skin so supple, his expression so intent and alert. He looked robotic now. But his hands were different: it was not Vision moving them.

Through Vision, Dr. Kapoor reached for a scalpel handle and affixed its blade. He cocked Vision's head in an unnatural, birdlike motion, looking at the join through Vision's fixed eyes. With Vision's left hand, he reached into the crease and spread his fingers. "Cutting," he said, and slid the scalpel up Steve's chest.

Steve hissed around the sock. It was just a small pain, a thin sharp pain like a papercut, long and clean and sudden and shallow, perhaps twelve inches from the bottom of the join to the top. The morphine didn't dull it, precisely, but stopped him from imagining an hour and a half of further, stranger pains to come. A cut: a cut was simple.

Kapoor put the scalpel aside and began shoving Vision's fingers into the wound, pushing the cut part of Steve's skin toward the join, toward Bucky. The scrape and stretch lit up the edges of the wound, and Steve trembled, Bucky trembled—he was feeling this, Steve realized. Bucky was feeling it across the join. "Uth ur orphie," Steve grunted at Bucky. Bucky thumbed the cap off one of the ampoules absently and jammed it into his leg. He left it stuck there, like a dart, wobbling. Steve looked away and down at the incision, and stared transfixed: Kapoor had grabbed a large pair of blunt forceps, and as he watched he jammed them into the wound, scissored them open, and pulled out firmly. They trembled and whimpered: it was a sick snapping tear, itching and subtle like a bad bruise. Under the skin it wasn't numb, it was shadowed, and it was not quite pain, but rather disquiet, that the invasion brought.

Kapoor rolled the skin forward to bare red and silver muscle. He moved down, peeling section by section with fingers and forceps, scissoring and hooking. Unpredictably, he would hit something sensitive and rip through it, and Steve lurched and cried out into the sock in his mouth. Bucky's breathing was loud and deep, his shoulders heaving.

Steve looked down again and saw Kapoor was barely to the edge of the seam.

Dr. Kapoor, at least, seemed to be satisfied with his progress. Vision's fingers probed and shoved busily as Kapoor muttered to himself in what was possibly Hindi. "Vision, I need ultrasound, can you convert your left index finger—beautiful. You are astonishing. The first group of vessels is right here," and he jabbed the forceps in in two places, sunk his fingers into the holes they made. Steve and Bucky both lurched away reflexively, crying out into their gags. "Nerve around here. Remind me to block it before cutting." Fingers and forceps moved to less sensitive areas, making weird thumps and twinges rather than the electric-prod tearing of when he had pressed deeper in the join.

"Steve, Barnes," Dr. Cho said over the line, "If at any time you give the word, we can stop. The wound could be bandaged and we can do this properly—"

Bucky reached up and took the sock out of his mouth. "Don't tempt me," he growled. He stuck himself with another morphine ampule.

Steve had suffered surgeries awake before—mostly in the War, Morita digging shrapnel out of him when they couldn't spare the last vial of morphine to buy Steve ten minutes of relief from a wound that would be gone in hours, and a couple times on covert ops with SHIELD when they either hadn't invented or hadn't brought his modified elephant tranquilizers, always Steve struggling to hold himself still while the medic stifled panic and ripped into him as gently as possible—but he'd never endured a surgeon blithely puttering around in him.

"Disgusting," Kapoor said with a note of glee in his voice, when he dug down to where the old paracord was embedded. He got the scissors and boldly slit through fat and gristle along the oozing track where the cord nestled, a hot new line of pain that opened up an inch deeper into the crease.

Vision didn't smile. It was hard to remember that Vision was even really present at the moment; it was Kapoor's prodding hands and Kapoor's muttering and Kapoor's rock and roll music jangling down the line, and Steve was positive that, thousands of miles away, Kapoor was smiling as he worked and as Steve and Bucky strove to hold themselves together. He took lengths of surgical thread like he was trussing a chicken, poked them in, wrapped them loosely around vessels to tighten them later. He peeled flesh apart and tore through the thin sections, used the scissors in others. He made dogged and painful progress, deeper and deeper, mumbling to himself in satisfaction all the while.

Bucky abruptly leaned forward and shuddered.

Steve reached around the soaped areas and grabbed his chest. Bucky froze, then eased Steve's hand away. Steve took the sock out of his mouth. "What is it?" he gritted.

Bucky removed his own sock. "He just called my artery his little bitch," he explained. He'd laughed. His voice was tight with it, laughter and pain.

Kapoor huffed over the line, and Vision's hands paused. "You speak Urdu."

"Enough to curse in. Not sure why."

"That wasn't your artery," Kapoor said, and went back to work. Bucky hissed and ground his teeth at the sharp sick tugging that raced through Steve's guts, too.

Steve used another vial of morphine. It didn't change much.

"When Kapoor ties off these vessels, you may experience unequal blood return," Dr. Cho announced. "If Vision notices one of you growing pale, the other may need to perform an abdominal strain."

Vision's hands paused. "That would work?" Kapoor asked, apparently to Dr. Cho.

There was a pause down the line. "If it doesn't work, they should be able to tolerate the derangements in blood volume until you finish the separation," Dr. Cho said.

Bucky let out a long sigh through his nose. Steve was so tired. He had used up about half his morphine.

Kapoor reached in again with Vision's bloody hands, and started tightening lengths of threads he had pre-placed. "Artery to anterior," he muttered to himself, or to Cho. "Artery to posterior. Minor artery to posterior. Vein to anterior. Vein to posterior. Vein to posterior. Nerve here, this I should block."

Steve's drawers were clammy and glued to his groin with pooling blood. They weren't even half-way separated. Bucky was tense in front of him, breathing deep and methodical, head bowed. Kapoor reached for a syringe and threaded its point deep into the swampy red space between them, and squeezed out some drug: it pinched, it burned, it crawled—all up Steve's front and back into his belly, shocking along his solar plexus. Bucky grunted. The drug kicked in and Steve felt hollow, like half of him had been carved away. Kapoor reached in with a pair of scissors and snipped, and Steve felt that, a twinge like shrapnel striking armor, a slap that stung, echoed, buzzed. More surgical thread, clever fingers, scissors, and more blood, vessels parting all up and down the wound, a slow and painstaking unfastening.

Something stung in his thigh; Steve looked down and saw that Bucky had stabbed him with two morphine vials. He realized he had been whimpering softly into the sock in his mouth.

Steve had never suffered such prolonged and deliberate pain. There had been nights he had spent awake coughing with a broken rib, that had faded with time in the haze of fever and sleep deprivation. A broken hand, crudely set inside ten minutes, then throbbing for more-or-less three weeks. After the serum, his senses and memory were sharpened as well as his healing, so while his injuries stayed with him vividly, his suffering was short. This time was slow. Fever and blood loss could not cloud his mind, and time would not over-write a single twitch of Vision's fingers against Steve's growing wound. These hours would stay with him forever.

More probing and ripping, more tying off blood vessels. More injections into nerves that didn't so much erase pain as transform it into something vacant and thrumming, and some injections that didn't do anything at all, so that they screamed when Kapoor made the cuts. Steve watched the wound creep across his chest, slow and deliberate like Kapoor was knitting a scarf. At last he reached the skin of the other side. Kapoor had Vision walk around them, wiped off the dry brown soap residue with more rubbing alcohol, and made a long cut down the front of Steve's chest just beside the seam. He peeled it back toward Bucky, ran the scissors through the filmy stuff that remained in a smooth confident stroke, and at last Bucky tipped forward, Steve backward.

Steve let the wet sock drop from his mouth. He'd chewed holes in it.

Bucky's back was a mess of tied-off vessels and two flopping, contracting sheets of skin. In places, Steve saw something silvery—gristle, bone, possibly metal. Steve's own chest was a great flat wound, already sealing pink on the left side where Kapoor had started. It burned in the cold, where it wasn't numb. Kapoor threaded a curved needle and bent over Bucky, stretching the skin flaps to mostly cover the remains of the join, and Steve found himself half-expecting to feel the prick and drag of the stitching. Like Bucky was a limb Kapoor had amputated.

"Steve, how are you feeling?" Cho asked over the line, and Kapoor turned Vision's head to fix Steve with unmoving eyes.

"Been better," Steve grunted. He supposed he should bandage himself. He pried himself off the icy floor, reached for the med kit, found gauze and tape. He did a crude job covering the wound which was all he'd ever needed since the serum, and wiped uselessly at the clotted and drying blood that covered everything below the waist.

Bucky was curled forward in a fetal position, shaking, forehead resting on his crossed arms as Vision bent over his back. The skin flaps meant to cover his wound looked wrinkled, ragged, transitioning from Steve's skin at the edges to the haphazard scar tissue that had been the seam and back to Bucky's skin. Kapoor was doing something complex and ugly with long wide stitches and little balls of gauze that stretched the skin to cover the wound. Steve picked up the blanket and sat beside Bucky's shoulder.

"Cold?" he asked.

Bucky grunted.

Steve started to tuck the blanket under his arms and around the areas away from the wounds, but Bucky pushed it off, grabbed it and pulled a corner over his left arm. He laid his head down on it and reached out with his right hand, gripped Steve's wrist, squeezed.

At last Dr. Kapoor finished. Bucky's back was still covered in dried blood, like most of the shed, but the wound where the skin flaps didn't quite meet was densely covered in a thick utilitarian mat of gauze temporarily sewn to his body. Vision's hands made a curious gesture, as though peeling off a pair of gloves starting at the fingertips. "Gentlemen," Kapoor said, "this has been interesting. Especially you, Mister Vision. You are a miracle. The surgical community needs a hundred of you."

"That is a philosophically troubling proposition," Vision said. His eyes lost the disturbing dummy-like fixedness they had had while Kapoor was using his body. "However, I will broach the idea of a telesurgery device with an integrated ultrasound probe and similar dexterity to Mister Stark."

"I understand none of us will mention today to anyone," Kapoor continued. There was a slapping sound, as though he was dusting off his hands. "Doctor Cho, I look forward to our future cooperation."

"Of course, Doctor Kapoor," Cho said with a stifled sigh. "Goodnight."


	5. Chapter 5

They took a couple days to rest up.

Steve slept for a few hours, woke up almost healed and ravenous. His nausea was gone. He ate three cans of tushonka, made a latrine call without having to verbally coordinate every step, and gingerly settled back onto his blanket to digest as he tried not to stare at Bucky. Bucky lay on his face in his own nest of blankets, so unnaturally still that Steve knew he was not sleeping. He wished they hadn't used up all the morphine.

Bucky's bandage needed to be changed—a long line of thread unwoven, the blood-soaked gauze peeled off and replaced, and the whole thing laced back together again—after the first ten hours, and again a day later. Vision was gone, checking in with Stark so no one would come looking for him, so Steve did the bandages, touching Bucky as gently and as briefly as possible. He missed him so badly already. For his part, when he wasn't eating or pretending to sleep, Bucky packed and re-packed one of the rucksacks Vision had brought. Steve, lacking any other urgent occupations, did the same.

Painfully, Steve faced the fact that Bucky could barely stand to be around him now—whether from their shared history or from the years of abuse he had suffered. He tried to look back on their years together with clarity. Bucky had stood by his side, always: he'd grafted Steve into the Barnes family, picked up extra shifts when Steve was too sick to work, put in a good word or three to get Steve considered for jobs, pitched in for medicine, posed for hours in a borrowed suit clothes-pinned at the back so Steve could draw him for ad copy, helped Steve ink and then run the finished ads to Sears & Roebuck when Steve couldn't get out of bed to do that, either. In the War it was similar: Steve had a harebrained plan and with Bucky's help and critique it became workable. Details like keeping the men fed, dry, and rested when possible, how to use cover to advance and when to stop and dig in, these decisions could only be made with practical experience that Steve did not then have. Bucky had always had his back, and it wasn't until Steve had been on his own, in nominal command of his own gaggle of strong-willed and vulnerable operators—okay, Tony Stark—that he'd known how painful it was to try to look after someone who barely looked after himself.

Steve had only been able to love Bucky. That couldn't make up for the cost.

Bucky would be safer, would hide better, without Steve. Steve stifled every question and suggestion that rose to mind in these hours before Bucky healed up from the wounds Steve had caused and disappeared again.

* * *

Vision's return spurred Steve to remove Bucky's bandage for the last time.

Vision knocked on the door, startling Bucky out of a doze and Steve out of staring at Bucky—drinking him in, relearning the contours of his arms and the curl of his hair, which was all he could see emerging from the blankets and sleeping bag he had draped over himself. Steve called, "Come in," and Vision opened the door, letting in a blast of cold and a sparkle of snow before he shut it.

"My absence was unremarked," Vision said. He was wearing a backpack over his cape, and he took it off. The cape appeared to pass straight through it as he did so. "I brought you ten thousand Euros in cash and four prepaid cell phones."

"What, didja rob a bank?" Bucky asked, rolling onto his side. The blankets dropped to his waist and the bandage laced to his back stuck up like a crest on a lizard.

"I used my salary," Vision said.

Steve startled. He'd never considered what Vision might spend his Avengers salary on. He didn't need to eat or drive, and seemed at most mildly curious about material goods. He was, arguably, the most valuable object in the Western world, given that his body was largely made from vibranium.

Bucky looked dumbfounded, too. "You have good friends, Steve," he said quietly. He took the backpack from Vision and inspected the phones, divided the cash in half.

"Thanks, Vision," Steve said. He stood and patted him on his cold mesh shoulder. He looked down at Bucky, and realized he had been putting this off. "How's your back feel?"

Bucky tensed his muscles in a slow and systematic march down his spine, then shimmied side-to-side a bit. "Ready." He looked up at Steve hesitantly, meeting his eyes for—for the first time since they'd woken up from the ice. "Hurts less than usual."

Steve knelt behind him and unpicked the thread that held the long hank of gauze to his wound. Lines of old scarring streaked outward from his left arm, and he let himself think it was not just his own acclimatization to the sight that made them look less raised, the hollows and knots in the muscle below less distinct.

He peeled the gauze off slowly. Dried blood stiffened it and glued the nonstick pad down, breaking off in flakes. Below was pink flesh, not the wet nubbly pink of a healing wound, but skin. The ruffled lines on either side of the wound where Kapoor had bent the skin of the join back toward Bucky had smoothed out into subtle marbling. Neither of them had much body hair, or anything resembling a tan, so Steve couldn't tell where Bucky's skin ended and the graft began—except for one spot, right in the middle. It was round, the width of his thumb, dark, raised in the middle . . .

He dug around in the med kit and came up with a band-aid, stuck it over the spot. Bucky jumped. "So your shirt doesn't chafe," Steve explained apologetically. He got a scissors and began to snip out the two rows of little free-standing stitches Kapoor had left in Bucky's skin to attach the bandage by. When he finished, he patted Bucky on the shoulder, and old gesture from when Bucky had used to patch Steve up before the war, and Bucky flinched. Steve moved away.

"Where are you headed?" Steve asked.

Bucky pulled on a red waffled undershirt, then two other shirts, then an arctic camo jacket. "Undecided. Maybe East."

"If you ever need anything—"

"Steve," Bucky cut him off, meeting his eyes again. "I don't know how I'm gonna do it. But I'm gonna live. Okay? Just, I can't run to the same places as you. Something tells me you can't hide worth a damn. You heard Cho, after eight months they don't even think I'm dead. I gotta disappear and I gotta do it alone. Please don't fight me on this."

It was the please. Bucky had pleaded with him before—Please don't start a scene in this crowded bar, Please just eat my Mom's liver and onions, Please don't use yourself and your stupid shield as a human minesweeper—but this please was for himself. More than that, it was a weak and bedraggled please, a please that dropped to the floor and stuck there like a soaked handkerchief, overused and saturated with despair. Please don't fight me on this. Please don't endanger me further.

Steve clenched his jaw and nodded tightly.

Bucky stared at him for a moment, then straightened slowly, hesitantly, and nodded back. "First. Vision. We're gonna break Maximoff out of prison."

Vision and Steve both startled. "Uh?" Steve said.

"Wanda Maximoff's legal team specifically forbid me—"

"The Oversight Committee wants me alive, right?" Bucky interrupted. Vision nodded, and he continued, "Then they've already thrown the law out the window. I'm a walking war crime." Bucky broke off and picked up his duffel bag, stuffed a couple more cans of tushonka into the top. "Hydra, Department X—Wanda's one of those weapons they made to replace me, they're never letting her go. She knew that and she fought on my say-so anyway."

Vision's eyes widened, his lips parted, a look of such profound hope that Steve was ashamed to have once thought him less than human. "I trust your judgment," Vision said. "Steven?"

Steve felt a smile tear its way through him, like the morning sun parting the fog. Bucky shouldered his duffel bag, ready to move but not yet about to disappear; Vision stood at his shoulder, hovering six inches off the floor in eagerness. "Sounds like we got a mission," he said. "Now all we need is a plan."

Bucky smiled and nudged Vision with his elbow. "Steve's swell with plans," he said, "as long as I'm around to stop him doing anything too stupid."

* * *

This was written for a prompt at avengerkink:

. com ?thread=53889813#t53889813

 _I'm sorry. This is pure ridiculous. Steve and Bucky get themselves frozen. Probably to save their lives, or preserve their bods. You decide the reason. Wherever they are, in a glacier or a cryotube or whatever, they just had to cuddle._

 _So when they wake up, their skin got frozen together. Full body stuck together. (Sensitive bits stuck together) Doesn't their serum regenerate cells?_

 _As many shenanigans as the internets can stand. Think they can run and shoot like that?_

Not as many shenanigans as suggested, but I think I did okay.


End file.
